How to Have a Jane Eyre Vacation

A novelist traces the steps of the Brontë sisters through the Yorkshire moors.

Nobody walks the Yorkshire moors in winter—as I soon learned one frigid December spent hiking through Brontë Country, where sheep outnumber people 20 to one. Emily Brontë described her native moors as “wuthering,” a word as haunting as it sounds: windy and roaring. When the skies opened and a pelting rainstorm swept in, my first thought was, Wuthering, indeed.

Woman versus nature is a recurrent theme in the classic novels of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë. Praised and disparaged alike for their wild imagination—one undoubtedly shaped by their harsh Northern landscape—they left a literary legacy that still speaks to readers two centuries later, hatching film and book retellings, and even a hashtag, #bronte200, to celebrate Charlotte’s bicentenary this April. Their legacy is all the more impressive given that none of the Brontës lived past the age of 39.

As a Brontëphile and lifelong lover of Jane Eyre ("Eyreheads," we’re called), I began my pilgrimage in the Yorkshire village of Thornton. The Brontës’ birthplace is now an Italian café called Emily’s by De la Luca Boutique—with scavenged school desks, French presses, and shabby-chic touches that read more Brooklyn than Blighty. A breakfast of steel-cut oats with milk and fresh berries seemed a fitting way to start my journey, though likely far more sumptuous than any porridge the Brontës would have endured.

The heart of Brontë Country is Haworth, the village where the family settled. From Thornton, the seven miles of impossibly narrow roads break into a vista of the Thornton viaduct. Built as a railway overpass in 1878, the bridge looks like a relic from Roman times. Haworth can also be reached by steam locomotive from Keighley village—the same train featured in the film adaptation of The Railway Children.

The village of Haworth is postcard cute, with stone cottages and cobbled roads of the sort you’d find in a Dickens remake. A stroll on Main Street takes you to Rose & Co. Apothecary, where Branwell Brontë, the sisters’ ne’er-do-well brother, satiated his laudanum cravings. Up the hill sits the Brontë Parsonage Museum, where the family lived and the sisters wrote the bulk of their novels. More than anything, the museum is a study in miniatures: from the Brontës’ minuscule hand-sewn juvenilia (books hardly bigger than a matchbox); to their tiny dresses, shoes, and writing desks. To tie in with the bicentenary is the exhibit “Charlotte Great and Small,” curated by novelist and Brontëphile Tracy Chevalier (Girl With the Pearl Earring; Reader, I Married Him).

Past the parsonage, the cobbled roads give way to a craggy landscape of undulating hills, dirt paths, and, of course, the howling wind—landscapes lifted straight from the novels. A good, if muddy, destination for an afternoon hike is the Brontë Waterfall, where the sisters might have stopped for a cool drink on their daily walks. More strenuous hikers can push on to Top Withens—the ruined farmhouse said to be the inspiration for the eponymous Wuthering Heights.

Haworth abounds with B&Bs playing to their Victorian charm. Ashmount, once home to Charlotte’s physician, is a gabled country house off Main Street. The Old Registry serves British specialties like roast pheasant, game pie with venison and rabbit, and steamed sponge with custard. Breakfast is the full Yorkshire fry-up with black pudding.

A wiser traveler might have put off a trip to Brontë Country until the bloom of spring or summer, when the landscape is lush and the weather perfect for picnics and T-shirts. But sunny days come few and far between in the pages of the Brontë novels. And what better way to experience the Yorkshire moorlands than as the sisters themselves had faced them each winter—in all their wild, bleak beauty.